Phil Miller covered three seasons of Twins baseball, but that was at a different ballpark for a different newspaper. Now Miller returns to the baseball beat after joining the Star Tribune as the Gopher football writer in 2010, and he won't miss the dingy dome for a minute. In addition to the Twins and Gophers, Miller covered the Utah Jazz and the NBA for six years at The Salt Lake Tribune.

Morneau: Don't read too much into Jays comment

Justin Morneau doesn't exactly disown the remarks he made to a foxsports.com reporter on Wednesday -- that it "would be very cool" to play for the Blue Jays someday -- but he doesn't want Twins fans to get the impression he's looking to leave, either.

"I said if [the Twins] decided to move me, if I'm not playing here, I want to play someplace where I could win," Morneau said on Thursday, shortly after Jon Paul Morosi's story, "Twins' Morneau is finally healthy," was published by the Fox Sports website. "He asked about Toronto. But right now, it's just another team in the American League. It's hard for me to talk about another team, because I'm trying to win here."

The foxsports.com article quite Morneau, asked about whether he would like to play in his home country's team at some point during his career, as saying about the Blue Jays, "that was my favorite team growing up, so that would be very cool."

He later adds, after emphasizing his commitment to the Twins first, that Toronto is "one of those intriguing places, where if you win, you have the whole country behind you. I grew up in Vancouver, and I was a Blue Jays fan. It's nationwide."

That latter part certainly appeals to Morneau, who noted that he was 12 when Joe Carter homered off Mitch Williams to win the 1993 World Series -- the most recent postseason game the Jays have appeared in. "What I also said was, it's good for baseball in Canada that Toronto is good. Because young kids look up to it -- maybe they say, 'I want to be a baseball player,' " Morneau said. "So it's good for baseball in Canada."

And that's something Morneau endorses whole-heartedly. He'll leave the Twins for Team Canada early next month to serve as the cleanup hitter on its World Baseball Classic team. Whether he eventually leaves the Twins for another Canadian team, well, that's a touchier subject.

"It's really hard to speculate about that stuff. Nobody knows what's going to happen, and if I had my preference, I'd stay here," Morneau said. "But it's not up to me."